Improving Adult Literacy Instruction Options for Practice and Research (2012) / Chapter Skim
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4 Principles of Learning for Instructional Design
4 Principles of Learning for Instructional Design
Pages 106-129
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From page 106... ...
. These reports and hundreds of published studies inform the committee's conclusions about the elements of instruction with potential to support adult learning and the research that is needed to discover how to apply these principles most effectively to improve the literacy skills of diverse populations of adult learners.
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From page 107... ...
How to use the principles of learning and effective literacy instruction presented in this report to substantially enhance the literacy of diverse populations outside school is an important question for future research. THE DEVELOPMENT OF EXPERTISE The ideal culmination of successful learning is the development of expertise.
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From page 108... ...
Adult literacy learners can be assumed to have missed out on many of these hours or to need substantially more practice. Adults bring varied goals to adult literacy education, but it is clear that given the hours of practice needed to develop literacy skills for functioning well in the realms of work, family, education, civic engagement, and so on, instruction needs to be designed to ensure that learning proceeds as efficiently as possible.
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From page 109... ...
These factors are important for educators and product developers to consider when designing curricula, texts, materials, and technologies and selecting or creating lesson plans for use in adult education programs. For adult learners who have underdeveloped literacy skills, following these guidelines is especially important for ensuring that new concepts are absorbed, even though literacy skill is, to some extent, the ability to overcome the less-thanoptimal designs of information sources.
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From page 110... ...
Use Multiple and Varied Examples There is substantial evidence that knowledge, skills, and strategies acquired across multiple and varied contexts are better generalized and applied flexibly across a range of tasks and situations (Atkinson, 2002; Catrambone, 1996; Paas and van Merrienboer, 1994; Schmidt and Bjork, 1992; Spiro et al., 1991)
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From page 111... ...
Does the intervention allow the person to perform better than they would have been able to without the particular material, tool, or approach to instruction? There is moderate evidence that the answer depends partly on the selection of learning goals, materials, and tasks, which should be sensitive to what the student has mastered and be appropriately challenging -- not too easy or too difficult, but just right (Metcalfe and Kornell, 2005; VanLehn et al., 2007; Wolfe et al., 1998)
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From page 112... ...
Instruction methods were differentially effective depending on the readers' starting skill levels on these dimensions. Readers with low lexical decoding benefited most from explicit teacher-managed code-focused instruction; this instruction was not helpful to readers with higher lexical decoding skills but low vocabulary.
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From page 113... ...
. Test on Multiple Occasions, Preferably with Spacing There is substantial evidence that periodic testing helps learning and slows down forgetting (Bangert-Drowns et al., 1991; Bjork, 1988; Butler and Roediger, 2007; Dempster, 1997; Karpicke and Roediger, 2007; McDaniel, Roediger, and McDermott, 2007; McDaniel et al., 2007; Roediger and Karpicke, 2006)
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From page 114... ...
At the same time, there also is a tendency for other genres than narratives to be underused in literacy instruction, and literacy does require the ability to handle a number of forms other than stories. In order to acquire
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From page 115... ...
. Learner-generated content can lack detail and contain misconceptions, however, that need to be monitored to ensure adequate learning and to prevent learning incorrect information.
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From page 116... ...
. There is substantial evidence that training students to ask deep questions facilitates comprehension of material from text, classroom lectures, and electronic media (Beck et al., 1997; Craig et al., 2006; Dillon, 1988; King, 1994; Pressley et al., 1992; Rosenshine, Meister, and Chapman, 1996)
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From page 117... ...
may be useful. Encourage the Learner to Construct Ideas from Multiple Points of View and Different Perspectives There is moderate evidence that opportunities to consider multiple viewpoints and perspectives about a phenomenon contribute to understanding a concept and to greater cognitive flexibility in accessing and using the concept in a range of contexts.
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From page 118... ...
. COMPLEX STRATEGIES, CRITICAL THINKING, INQUIRY, AND SELF-REGULATED LEARNING Students often lack the knowledge, skills, and meta-awareness needed to focus attention on content relevant to a task or goal, to comprehend text, to study material sufficiently, or to perform effectively on complex cognitive tasks.
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From page 119... ...
. There is some evidence that adults from a wide age range can benefit from instruction in memory monitoring strategies to improve memory performance (Dunlosky, Kubat-Silman, and Hertzog, 2003)
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From page 120... ...
. Combine Complex Strategy Instruction with Learning of Content There is moderate evidence that strategy instruction should be deeply integrated with subject-matter content rather than being lists of abstract rules or scripted procedures that ignore the content (National Research Council, 2000)
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From page 121... ...
. Accurate and Timely Feedback Helps Learning There is substantial evidence that students benefit from feedback on their performance in a learning task, but the optimal timing of the feedback depends on the task (Pashler et al., 2005; Shute, 2008)
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From page 122... ...
? As in much of instructional design, there are a number of trade-offs and sensitivities to the nature of the knowledge and skills being trained.
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From page 123... ...
. Adaptive Learning Environments Foster Understanding in Complex Domains There is moderate evidence that learning of complex material requires adaptive learning environments that are sensitive to the learner's general profile and to the level of his or her mastery at any given point in time.
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From page 124... ...
Even without any machine intelligence, it is possible to mark text segments according to the amount of time past readers have spent on them and thus guide students to consider their efforts more carefully. Interactive Learning Environments Facilitate Learning There is moderate evidence that learners benefit from instructional interactions in which they receive fine-grained feedback (i.e., feedback specific to the immediate momentary task at hand)
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From page 125... ...
Yet much needs to be understood about how to design effective anchored learning experiences to achieve goals related to literacy and learning. For instance, for any particular topic, what learning goals do students pursue and what material should be read to achieve the learning goals?
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From page 126... ...
The principles are expected to generalize across populations, but how to apply them to the development of effective literacy instruction for diverse adult learners in various forms of adult education and developmental instruction in college must be determined in future research. Given the findings from research on learning, three questions should guide this research.
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From page 127... ...
To what extent can reading and writing skills be developed as part of developing these forms of literate practice? Given that most literate practice in today's world involves technologies, a goal for research is to determine how to effectively integrate important technologies into literacy instruction and practice to enable adults to function effectively in their educational, work, and social environments.
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From page 128... ...
Select learning goals, materi T als, and tasks that are sensitive to what the student has mastered and that are appropriately challenging. Scaffold learning with instructional interactions and systematic selection and sequencing of content, materials, and tasks that are both at the appropriate level of difficulty and provide prompts and information needed to learn.
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From page 129... ...
Complex Strategies, Critical Thinking, Inquiry, and Self-Regulated Learning • tructure instruction to develop the effective use of complex strategies. S Explicit training, modeling, and guided practice in the use of complex strategies is especially important for those with serious limitations in metacognition (the ability to understand, assess, and act on the adequacy of one's memory, com prehension, learning, planning, problem-solving, and decision processes)
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